If you read the title of this post and thought that we spelled “soldier” wrong, then you’re in the right place. We’ll teach you the basics of soldering and provide you with an alternative to practicing on your iPhone — a nifty little “Simon” game! Along the way, you’ll learn what a capacitor does, how to interpret those enigmatic, colorful bands on resistors, as well as which way a diode goes on a circuit. Not sure what a diode is? You’ll learn that too.

Who knew that hunching over and squinting at a 1.5″ x 2″ green board could be so much fun? Not to mention that you’ll get to have your way with some hot stuff… Seriously, soldering irons get very hot, so be careful as you brandish that fiery weapon.

We’re convinced that by the time you’re done creating this nifty little device, you’ll have the burning desire to be an electrical engineer at heart. And if you finish soldering this cool little game, and you come to realize you don’t like taking orders from Simon, you’ve picked up the skills along the way to unmake Simon. Just grab some desoldering braid and have at it!

When HP announced the TouchPad, we were excited. We enjoyed ripping apart the Palm Pre, but decided to wait until WebOS caught on before taking apart the new TouchPad. Now that it is at the height of its popularity, it’s high time to pay the little-tablet-that-could-have-been-great some attention. Because if we don’t, no one ever will, and that’s sad. So without further ado—and before HP takes the TouchPad out behind the barn and shoots it—we’re launching a full set of repair guides and a native iFixit WebOS app!

The hundreds (possibly even single-digit-thousands?) of people who’ve spent their hard-earned money on a TouchPad are about to be joined with at least a few thousand more users. Rumor has it HP is sitting on excess stocks of 200,000 unsold units. To clear the excess stock—and drive the last nail into their stillborn child’s coffin—HP just announced that the TouchPad will be sold for $99 this weekend.

So we have decided to repurpose the TouchPad as a dedicated repair manual. For $99, you could head down to AutoZone and buy a couple outdated service manuals. Or, for the same price, you can get a brand-new Touchpad and have all of iFixit at your fingertips. Imagine: the largest online service manual, always up to date, and completely portable. Your workshop might never be the same!

But it would be unconscionable for us to recommend you buy a tablet that has already been discontinued without a plan for making it last. Yes, the TouchPad is the cheapest repair manual the world has ever seen. But it’s also got a built-in battery with a finite life and a fragile glass screen. HP cut this machine off at the vine before it bloomed, and it would be insane to expect them to help you service it. Buy the TouchPad, and you’re on your own. But we can help.

Fixing your TouchPad

Tablet computers are the best money-making compromise the tech industry has ever seen: they combine raw computing power of a full-size PC with the “discard-every-year-or-two” promise of the cell phone in one tidy package. This allows the manufacturer (whether HP, Apple, or another) to effectively keep selling updated, high-profit tablet PCs to consumers at a steady rate.

Tablets are tidy black boxes that scream “toss me” at the first sign of trouble. And although they haven’t been around that long time, we’re seeing the same disturbing disposability with tablets that we’re accustomed to with cell phones.

That’s why it’s so crucial to have repair guides for the TouchPad. Even though at a glance the tablet is a screen with a magic cover that “just works,” there’s tons of repairable stuff to be found inside. If something breaks, you don’t need to buy a new one—heck, you won’t be able to. Instead, use our repair guides to fix it yourself! Keep one more device from joining the rest of its brethren in the landfill.

Opening the TouchPad.

Repair stuff with the iFixit WebOS app

So you took our advice, rushed down to Best Buy, and bought a soon-to-be-defunct tablet. Well done! Now you can hop onto the WebOS app store and download our app, thanks to a certain Ben Tattersley! Using our open API, he single-handedly created a free WebOS application to display our guides. He did a bang-up job—the app is really quite good. Which is a shame, because most of you reading this will never know it. Yet the thriftiest 1% of you that do buy the TouchPad at fire-sale prices will get always-on access to thousands of iFixit guides. (There’s no web link, because HP apparently never got around to it. But trust us—buy a TouchPad, tap the ‘HP App Catalog’ icon, and search for iFixit.)

Tablets are the best way to use repair manuals: you can take them almost anywhere, their long battery life ensures you can make good progress on your repairs, and touch scrolling means you can navigate easily even with dirty hands.

We open source all our mobile apps. Ben set up a Github repository for the iFixit app, just in case you’re interested in contributing to the code. Or not. Decide for yourself whether you want to join us in embracing a dead platform.

The iFixit WebOS app

P.S. If you want to buy a tablet that you can use as something other than a repair manual, get an iPad. We’ve got a native app for it, too.

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I have a big announcement to make. For the first time ever, iFixit is branching out from our core business of selling parts and tools. We’re going to start selling software—the same software that we use to run iFixit. This is something that astute observers may have expected from the development, and success, of Make: Projects.

User manuals are stuck in the 20th century. Even the best manuals are still distributed as static PDFs. Service technicians are often stuck with documentation that is months, if not years, out of date. Users hate IKEA-style manuals with vague instructions, confusing graphics, and no photos.

We started iFixit with the idea that there was a better way—that useful documentation could help people do amazing things.

Our intuitive, step-by-step repair manuals changed the world. Millions of people have fixed their own electronics using iFixit’s manuals—making it the most popular service documentation platform ever created.

Today, we are announcing Dozuki: the software behind iFixit’s manuals. We’re taking the site that you all know and love, and turning the technology behind it into software products that we’re going to sell to manufacturers. Dozuki has two products, Guidebook and Answers. Check it out at dozuki.com, and let me know what you think.

Guidebook makes step-by-step instructions come alive.

Guidebookis a modern procedural documentation platform. Guidebook makes it easy for anyone to create how-to instructions or publish service documentation for complex devices. Every manual is available online, as downloadable PDFs, through dedicated mobile apps like iFixit’s iOS app—or through custom API applications. It’s simple for technicians to suggest changes, so manuals consistently get better over time.

Answers transforms conversations into archived wisdom.

Answers is enterprise-grade Q&A for experts. Answers is a structured tool for focusing expert conversations into a useful (and searchable) knowledge base. Answers gives companies the ability to make their products a hub for knowledge exchange.

Building expert communities

iFixit won top online community this year at South by Southwest (SXSW). This announcement makes their expertise at building communities available to manufacturers of all sizes. Dozuki isn’t just a content management system—it’s a community platform that empowers companies to give their expert customers a voice. Companies that allow their customers to extend their documentation will see consumers flock to sustainable, durable products. By joining the community, manufacturers have the opportunity to set a positive tone, provide leadership, and increase long-term demand.

Workgroup collaboration

Dozuki also targets enterprises needing collaborative workgroup tools. Imagine improving the productivity of distributed teams by giving people access to domain expertise already available within the company. Dozuki can transform existing procedures and support documents into a framework for social interaction.

Proven solution

Dozuki’s powerful framework has powered iFixit onto Inc’s list of the 5000 fastest growing companies for the past three years. iFixit is now one of the largest Apple parts companies in the world, hosting complete service manuals for every major Apple product. iFixit’s popular gadget teardowns receive millions of views and drive consistent e-commerce growth.

We partnered with O’Reilly to bring Make Magazine’s exciting do-it-yourself projects into the digital realm. Their successful Guidebook community, Make: Projects, allows users to post their own DIY projects alongside Make’s professional articles.

Dozuki is in private beta now and will be launching publicly this fall. If you’re interested, head over to dozuki.com and add yourself to the beta invite list. We’ll be inviting members of the community to the beta early.

What does this all mean?

We’re very excited about what this means for iFixit. We’re constantly looking for ways to continue investing in the site and hire more engineers without running advertisements on iFixit. We’re as committed as ever to building a free online repair manual for everything, and if Dozuki is successful, we’ll have additional resources to throw at making the world’s best repair manual. As always, we’re committed to making iFixit the best that it can be, and I welcome your feedback and feature suggestions.

Gone are the days of spinning optical media! Say goodbye to the huge stacks of jewel cases, 700 MB limits, and skipping tracks whenever you drive over speed-bumps. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, CDs are no longer the way of the future. They’re a thing of the past, just like their eight-track ancestors. Box them away, use them as shiny coasters, and by all means stop putting them in your computers.

Here are the days of mass storage, near-instant access, and skip-proof handling. As hard drives and solid-state drives continue to drop in price, they continue to rise in usefulness and availability. They are faster, stronger, and better than optical media, and they can be written an almost infinite number of times.

So what are you waiting for? Get rid of that dusty old optical drive inside your unibody MacBook or MacBook Pro! With this optical bay enclosure, you can disguise any hard drive as an optical drive and use it as a secondary drive. Once installed, the second drive will be considerably faster and safer than your optical media.

We’ve been selling a similar optical bay drive enclosure for some time now; but in true iFixit fashion, we’re never satisfied with the status quo. Our revised optical bay enclosure specifically addresses a small shortcoming of the old one — the earlier version had no flanges to allow it to be securely screwed to the front of the unibody case, causing the enclosure and hard drive to be a little loose. In our new-and-improved enclosure, there are added flanges and screws to make sure that the hard drive is as snug as a bug in a rug.

The new-and-improved enclosure is tailored specificially for unibody MacBooks and MacBook Pros

We found in our teardown that the new Mac Mini had a lovely empty spot for a secondary drive. Needless to say, in the days following the teardown we received hundreds of requests for some way to add a secondary drive to the new Mini without having to buy the $400-extra Server model.

It took a while to sort out the gremlins and align the stars, but it’s finally here! Our new Mac Mini Dual Hard Drive Kit is the perfect solution to add a second hard drive to your Mini.

Want instant-on access? Just couple the kit with an SSD or the Seagate Hybrid 500GB SATA drive (which includes a 4GB SSD on it) to make Lion run like a cheetah. Or, if extreme storage is your thing, install two Seagate 750 GB drives into your Mini for 1.5 Terabytes of storage awesome!

We managed to toss all the components above into one tidy little package and set the price to $69.95. And once you have the kit, just follow our awesome instructions to get your second drive installed properly.

Though it has been an absolutely gorgeous and mild summer here at iFixit headquarters, we’ve been working diligently in the studio, producing tons of new repair and teardown videos. What can we say? We love what we do. Here’s a sampling of what we’ve released recently:

There are dozens of more videos on our YouTube channel, ranging from game console repairs, to a Q&A segment called Ask iFixit, to a particularly informative video on ESD. If you think our time spent hunkered down in the studio is worth the effort, stay up-to-date with all of our teardown and repair videos is by subscribing–for free–to our YouTube channel!

Lastly, we love to answer questions. For example, maybe you want us to show you how to repair a jetski? Or maybe your boat is on the fritz? Or perhaps you have some other project in mind that would require us to go to the lake and enjoy the fabulous weather? If you’ve got a question that you’d like to have answered, email it to askifixit at ifixit.com, and we might feature it on an upcoming episode of Ask iFixit.